Picking a movie to watch on an airplane is tricky business. Inexpe­ri­enced travelers make the mistake of choosing the movie they’ve been waiting to watch for the past month, or the one they think they’ll like the most. Bad idea. The audio is pretty bad on any airplane, and add the engine noise to that, and you’re left trying to lip-read the actors. Or you’ll crank up the volume to a point where you go deaf, and then life isn’t as much fun anymore.

Worse still, the little video screen in front of your seat may get turned off a little early, just before you’re told the name of the villain in a whodunit. And if that’s the movie you’ve been itching to watch for a while, it’s been effec­tively ruined for you.

That’s why I decided to watch “A Time Traveler’s Wife” on my trip from Seattle to Mumbai. It’s a perfect pick: I never really intended to watch the whole thing, so I couldn’t care less if it got cut off in the middle. The dialog didn’t matter too much, since Rachel McAdams is easy on the eyes and this is such a typical romance (man loves woman, woman loves man, man keep disap­pearing and popping up in other times, yada, yada…). And of course, I dozed off several times as the movie played on, but that didn’t matter all that much either.

Anyway, with this a priori stance about the movie, you shouldn’t really be expecting an unbiased review, but the truth is, I’m not here to comment on the movie at all. In fact, the only comment I have is on the name of the movie: I strongly believe the movie should have been named The Guy Who Disap­pears and Steals Clothes because, well, that’s what the lead character does all the time. Yes, he travels through time, sure, but that’s quite irrel­e­vant, especially on mute.

Speaking of traveling through space-time, have you ever noticed how time-travelers appear elsewhere almost instan­ta­neously? In real life, I would expect molecules of air and dust to get shoved aside violently when this happens, causing a tiny explo­sion. Oh well, I guess you can’t be all that realistic in a movie.…

On the bright side, this time traveler was less annoying than Hiro the Hero.

Horror movies seldom frighten me and I did not watch Phoonk hoping that it would. I was hoping, though, that it wouldn’t move me to fits of laughter (which it unfor­tu­nately did).

There’s no doubt that Ram Gopal Varma’s genre of horror is way better than the tradi­tional Ramsay Brothers’ formula. Even so, low expec­ta­tions is no excuse for making a mediocre film. Phoonk is a mixture of ideas taken from The Omen, The Exorcist and others, with an occasional attempt at cuteness. The under­lying theme is the usual one: a man who doesn’t believe in the super­nat­ural and his gradual trans­for­ma­tion into a believer. Perhaps this movie was aimed at an audience unfamiliar with those classic themes, but a little origi­nality would have been more than welcome.

I am also disap­pointed with the background score of the film. This is one of the most impor­tant elements of any movie, and is especially impor­tant for one that claims to scare its audience. Consider any well-received movie and you will find a fantastic score played at the right time and place, subtle yet effec­tive. In the case of Phoonk and such other films, there’s nothing but a suppos­edly scary piece of music played loudly at random inter­vals, making it quite hard to listen to the dialogue.

Cinema is a compo­si­tion of light and sound that requires careful timing, a plot built up at the right pace and a series of climaxes that enthralls the audience in one way or the other. Phoonk tries to be a ‘scary movie’ from the begin­ning to the end, and not surpris­ingly, it fails at this task.